MagicDraw simplified view

Question

I have used MagicDraw v18.5 to draw a class diagram. My diagram has classes, attributes, stereotypes, and notes.

My business users find my diagram too technical. I would like a way to give them a dumbed-down, business-friendly view that shows only classes and associations, without the attributes or stereotypes.

I tried the one thing I know: select everything in the diagram, edit the compartments, and hide the attributes and stereotypes. But the result looks terrible: the content of the compartments disappears as intended, but the compartments aren't resized. Each class is a box with a big empty Attributes compartment. I could never show this to a business user without manually resizing.

Is there a more straightforward way to do this?

Answer 1

Note this is using MagicDraw 19.0-SP2, so there might be some differences.

I'll use block elements as an example, instead of classes, but they are just "fancy" SysML classes. Your symbols probably look something like this as described:

with my empty compartments being "values" and "operations", instead of "attributes" and "stereotypes". The principle is the same for any compartment.

Suppress/Hide the compartments, rather than remove the properties from them.

Per the comments, it appears you have removed the elements from the compartments, rather than hiding/removing the compartments themselves. If you click on the class element symbol, on the left there should be small minus signs that you can click to "Suppress", or hide, each compartment completely.

Alternatively, you can click the "..." Compartments icon on the left at the top (to the left of the symbol name/header) and then remove the checkmark for any compartment you want to hide.

There is also an entry on the Compartments menu to "Suppress All" which will turn all of them off.

After suppressing the compartments, click the auto-size icon at the bottom right and you should get something with just the name:

Bulk Edit multiple symbols at once

You can select all the class symbols at once, and edit them in bulk, rather than following the above for each symbol on your diagram.

To do this, click on a class symbol, then use ctrl-shift-s to select all other symbols of the same type. If you click on multiple types of objects (e.g. hold shift and select both a class and a comment symbol at the same time), then it will select all of the symbols that match the type any of the elements already selected.

Now you can right-click and select symbol properties and will have access to the common properties of all those symbol types at once. Doing it this way will avoid snagging all element types, such as labels and relationships, which often do not have the same symbol properties, and therefore cannot be bulk edited together.

Alternatively, you can open or select the Properties window, then select the "Symbol" tab, to have access to the same properties for bulk edit. The other tabs in the Properties window provide a power means of editing element, tag, and traceability properties in bulk:

In either window, starting typing "Suppress" in the search bar, and you will get all the options for suppressing things from being visible on your selected elements. In the case of a SysML block, which can be True (checked), False (unchecked), or a black box with <undefined>, which will happen if some symbols are currently set True while others are False.

Setting the "Suppress Operations" and "Suppress Values" in my case are the two items I need to hide those compartments on my test Block symbol.

Bulk Autosize

After hiding the compartments, you can click on the auto-resize button in the bottom right, but I recommend going into the awful keyboard shortcut editor and struggling with it until you have setup a shortcut key for auto-size. Then you can hit ctrl-a to select all symbols at once, or ctrl-shift-s for all elements of a specific type, and use the shortcut key to autosize all of them at once.

They have updated it recently to make it not-quite-so-awful, so it's different than 18.5, so I'll leave the steps as an exercise for the reader. I use this shortcut all the time.

Apply word wrap if needed.

You can use the 'word wrap' symbol attribute to allow you to resize to a smaller size and have long names wrap into multiple rows, allowing you to make a symbol thinner.

Note: Word wrap only shows up under the "All" view, not even under "Expert" in Symbol Properties.

1. Switch from "Standard" or "Expert" to "All" in the view dropdown on the upper right of the symbol properties window.

2. Type "wr" in the search to find the "Wrap Words" property, and set it to true.

Now you can resize your symbol to a thinner version with a name or other properties that wrap onto multiple rows. Why they don't have this property set by default is beyond me...

Unfortunately, you will need to resize elements manually to get them to actually wrap the words, but once you have the width the way you want, auto-size will work fine.

You can also make everything really skinny, then use the "Layout -> Make same width" command to make all elements the same width as the widest selected symbol, if you want uniformity.